


270. time runs slowly

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [242]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 06:00:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9979553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: After the island, Sarah stays with Helena. Just for a little while.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: animal butchering, wound care]

Helena hears the sounds of footsteps in her dream first. Then she is awake – and then she realizes she is awake because she can hear footsteps outside, crunching through the snow. There is a knife under her pillow. She rolls herself up to her feet and listens to—

A knock on the door. Pat-pat. Helena blinks at the door, and then stands and answers it.

“Hey,” says Sarah, all seasick grinning and skin that is too pale. “Can I come in?”

Helena frowns at Sarah – at the bandage on her face, on the way her weight leans on one leg. At the lack of car outside. She lets Sarah in. “Hello, _sestra_ ,” she says. “Did you stop Evie Cho?”

Sarah stares at her blankly and then drops her backpack with a _thud_ to the ground. “Yeah,” she says, voice strained. “Yeah, meathead, we stopped Evie Cho.” She drops herself next to her backpack. _Thud_. “I know this is – out of nowhere, but. Can I – stay here? For a bit? Just need to get out. You know.”

“Yes,” Helena says. “I know.” Then she realizes that Sarah is still looking at her, like this is a question, like Sarah doesn’t already know the answer.

“Of course,” she says. “You can always stay, Sarah. There is room. And meat. And other things, because _sestra_ Alison said so.”

“Cheers,” Sarah says quietly. She has folded her legs up to her chest, and she’s staring at the tiny fire murmuring away to itself under the metal grate. Helena looks at her sideways. Waits for her to talk. She doesn’t talk.

“Sarah,” she says, “did something ha—”

“Really don’t want to talk about it,” Sarah says, stabbing Helena’s words right through. Helena closes her mouth. Helena folds her lips between her teeth.

“Okay,” she whispers, and pokes the fire a little bit to try and make it warm.

* * *

Sarah doesn’t answer her phone when it buzzes. Sarah doesn’t really move, just sits there in the fire and sometimes goes outside the hut to make water. She doesn’t go far into the woods. “I don’t want to,” she says, “alright? Please don’t – please just don’t, Helena.” So Helena: doesn’t. Helena hovers her fingers over the buttons on her own phone, wonders if she should let Sarah’s family know: Sarah is here, Sarah is alive, Sarah is limping and does anybody know why?

But – Helena feels bad for thinking this, Helena doesn’t stop thinking this – _but_ that family is Sarah’s family. Sarah is Helena’s family. At the end of all things, if she had to choose, she would choose Sarah. So she does. She makes enough stew for both of them, and when Sarah turns her back Helena blows on her bowl so it cools faster. She tries to put it into the broth, into the furs she gives to Sarah, into all of this: _I know the way it lives in you. I know how much it hurts. You must be so scared. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay_.

She doesn’t say that. Crack a branch in the woods, deer runs. Say _if you want to talk_ , girl runs. Helena was the girl once. She knows.

* * *

Days pass. They don’t speak, much. The third time Sarah tries to change the bandage on her leg Helena stops her, and does it instead. Her bandage wrapping is better. She has put a lot more bandages on herself than Sarah has, probably; she knows how to tie it. She melts snow in cupped hands and pours it over the wound until the wound is clean.

“Sugar helps,” she says, “with knife wounds.”

Sarah goes stiff under her palms, but Helena doesn’t say anything else besides that. There is no sugar in the woods. Helena survived wounds without sugar before; Helena survived without anything to put in the wound except her own dirty fingers. Sarah will be fine. Helena refuses to let Sarah be anything but fine.

She buries the soiled bandages under the ground. When she covers them up, it’s like they aren’t there.

Days and days and days. Rabbits from the traps. Sarah limps outside of the hut to watch Helena skin them. “Didn’t know you knew how to do that,” she says.

“There are many things you do not know,” Helena says, but she doesn’t say it to be cruel. It’s just a fact. Sugar helps with wounds. There are things about Helena Sarah does not know.

“You don’t know anything,” Sarah says, and here is the difference: Sarah says it to be cruel.

“You could tell me,” Helena says without looking up from the rabbit. With its fur gone it’s just pink and cold. It looks like fear. Helena flicks gut-bits off of her knife and into the snow. Sarah keeps on not answering her; Sarah keeps on not telling anything. Helena isn’t stupid – though maybe that’s another thing Sarah doesn’t know. But she isn’t. Sarah at her hut with a stab wound. Sarah not answering her phone.

If Sarah asked Helena to—

Well. Helena sleeps with a knife under her pillow. That’s all.

* * *

“I should have let you kill Rachel,” Sarah says in the dark. Pile of furs: Sarah. Dark shifting shape: Sarah.

“Brother- _sestra_ would have gone to jail,” Helena says sleepily. “Too pretty for jail.”

“I should’ve let MK kill Ferdinand,” Sarah says, voice tight with anger – voice like a living rabbit, running anxious hungry through the snow. All muscle. The first rabbit Helena peeled apart with her fingers, looking for where rabbits kept their fear; she never found it. “I shouldn’t have let Cosima go to the island. I should have—”

“Too late,” Helena says.

Sarah stops talking. All her _should_ s hover around her head like moths in the dark.

“No fixing,” Helena says. She rolls over. Sarah’s back is still to her, but Helena likes to think it matters anyways. “Already done. Past is past.”

“You can go forward and fix it, maybe,” she says.

Miserable silence in the hut. The air like Sarah’s wound: pink, angry, hurting.

“I don’t want to,” Sarah says. “Why’s it always have to be me, huh? Why can’t someone else bloody fix it for _once_ , just _once_ , why can’t I—” and her breath is jagged-shuddering. She curls in on herself, tight. Maybe she wants to break, but: Helena made this place round, Helena filled it with soft edges. Nothing to break in here.

“But you want to fix it,” Helena says.

“Yeah.” Word its own small guilty confession.

“Mm,” Helena says. She shifts in the furs, pulls them closer. “You can stay here, _sestra_ , for always. But staying is running. And someday soon I think you will stop running from and start running to. And it will be better for you. Being mad at things you can fix is better than being mad at things that are over and gone.” She shrugs a shoulder, even though she knows Sarah can’t see it. “This is what I think.”

“When’d you get so smart, huh,” Sarah whispers to her. Her voice has a smile in it, maybe. Maybe.

“Many many things you don’t know,” Helena says. “I am smart sister. All the brains in mother’s belly go to me. Sorry.”

“Piss off,” Sarah says, but the words break with laughter partway through and don’t manage to sting.

“No,” Helena says. “Do this outside, please. Not in my bed.”

“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” Sarah says, still laughing. She readjusts. “God, you’re so gross.”

“And yet,” Helena says. “You are here in my house with me.” She means this as a joke; it doesn’t quite come out as one. Words too soft.

“Yeah,” Sarah says. “Guess I am.” She clears her throat, a short scuff of a sound. “Thanks, for that. By the way.”

“Of course,” Helena says. “Always.”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Sarah says. “Promise. Just – not now?”

“When you’re ready,” Helena says.

“Thank you,” Sarah says. It’s the last thing either of them say before they fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
